Friday, March 31, 2017

Colonel House and Woodrow Wilson: Paving the Way for War By T. Hunt Tooley Mises.org

[Editor’s Note: This is part 4 of a multi-part series.]
In reconstructing the American decision to enter the Great War, the
relationship between Colonel Edward Mandell House and his “alter ego,”
Woodrow Wilson, is crucial. Robert Higgs has called the Colonel “one of the most important Americans of the twentieth century.”
House played the central role in choosing and grooming Woodrow Wilson
to become a presidential candidate, a role he relished. We could regard
him as a significant historical actor even if this achievement had been
his only one. But the rest of the story is that House became an
“intimate” friend of Woodrow Wilson, Wilson’s “alter ego,” as the two
liked to say. Wilson’s chief of staff, Joseph Tumulty, testified to this
close relationship, as did dozens of others. Ultimately, House would
become a special roving emissary of Woodrow Wilson in Europe from 1914
onward. In this capacity, and through a large private network of highly
influential friends, House’s influence on American intervention in World
War I can hardly be exaggerated. So who was this very important
American?

House was a Texan. His father had immigrated to Texas in the early
years of the state and had made a fortune as a blockade runner during
the American Civil War. Edward Mandell House was born in 1858 in Houston
and attended elite secondary schools in England and the northeastern
United States. Eventually, he ended up at Cornell University. When his
father died in 1880, House returned to Texas and took over management of
the family fortune of $500,000, something like eleven million dollars
today. Not chicken feed, to be sure, but not a fortune that put him in
the league of the individuals with whom he would soon be rubbing
shoulders. Doing business in banking and railroads, House crossed paths
with the J.P. Morgan more than once, and many other leading individuals
of the day.
Before long, he left the business to work in politics, but his aim
was to work behind the scenes, to influence politics rather than leading
as a figurehead. It may have been, as some biographers have suggested,
that House considered his constitution as lacking the physical stamina
for electioneering. But he certainly had a predilection for being the
man behind the curtain in any case.
In Texas, House decided to back a gubernatorial candidate in 1890.
For all House’s railroad and oil connections, he chose the
“trust-busting” populist Democrat “Big Jim” Hogg, and he was successful.
Incidentally, it was a grateful Governor Hogg who appointed him an
honorary state “Colonel,” designation which House adopted proudly. But
the Colonel had only just begun. Masterminding the elections of four
Texas governors, House decided to go East just after the turn of the
century to seek out a national candidate to groom for President.
House had long since collected a very large circle of wealthy
individuals, including many in the rarefied world of J. P. Morgan — by
all accounts, he combined a kind of introverted public view and amazing
social skills, including a very sharp sense of humor. Indeed, in his
later years, a short memoir dwelt lovingly and in detail on the many
elaborate practical jokes of his youth and indeed through his college
years, almost all of them played in such a way as to demean and control.
It is worth noting that many of them were essentially double
manipulations which ended by tricking his own partners in crime. “Cruel
sport if you like,” wrote House in memoir years later, “but one
fascinating to a half-grown boy.” In any case, he saved his most
manipulative pranks for “some boastful, arrogant, conceited boy.” Actual
psychologists have pondered these passages House wrote. For the
armchair psychologist, it is fascinating as well, considering House’s
manipulations recorded in his diaries for later historians.
By the time he entered politics, he had begun to embrace
Progressivism, a doctrine of efficiency and wise leadership which was
informed by the Positivist doctrine of French sociologist Auguste Comte.
Progressivism became a widespread political movement in American life
(as in the world as a whole), and in America, it emanated from and came
to characterize the wealthy and wise men of “efficiency” and “capital,”
chiefly from the Northeast. Indeed, in 1912 the Colonel would write a
didactic novel (“not much of a novel,” commented House himself to a
friend). The book was Philip Dru, Administrator, whose
protagonist would reshape the government of the United States, freeing
it for reform by freeing it from the corrupt and ignorant element of an
elected legislative branch, a constitutional element Comte himself saw
as a roadblock to “Positive” administration.
Living in New York, House found Woodrow Wilson, a Progressive
one-term governor of New Jersey who had been an academic. Wilson served
as President of Princeton, but entered New Jersey state politics, having
left Princeton under heavy criticism for his high-handed reform of the
curriculum and direction of the institution, condemned by many as a
self-righteous, authoritarian leader who hated compromise. In late 1911,
after a first “delightful visit” with Wilson, House wrote to a
confidant, “He is not the biggest man I ever met, but he is one of the
pleasantest and I would rather play with him than any prospective
candidate I have seen.”
House and Wilson were opposites in many ways. The quietly jovial,
supercilious House and the formal, earnest but “pleasant” Wilson. The
non-religious Texan admirer of heroic frontier men of violence and the
Presbyterian minister’s son whose life was circumscribed by a long line
of church ladies. House, who reveled in recounting the practical jokes
of his youth designed to belittle and control those around him, and
Wilson, whose humor was of the quietest, most conventional kind. House,
whose diary and letters universally groan with gourmet meals in the best
restaurants with wine flowing, and the abstemious Wilson, who ate and
drank little, preferring indeed to do that little within a quiet family
circle.
Yet the two men had much in common. As many historians have pointed
out, both were outsiders in terms of national politics, both late-comers
to the Progressive political movement, both middle-aged Southerners,
and both admirers of “vigor” and efficiency in individuals and
government. Both men admired Great Britain with passion. Both men hoped
to make a mark in life larger than the very respectable marks that each
had already made. Both House and Wilson embodied those Comtean,
Positivist elements of Progressivism that relied on the certainties of
social science as a means of ruling. The great project of this odd
couple and their Progressive associates was the efficient organization
of the world in conjunction with the needs of the many, the few, the
state, and the modern mind as a whole. Both House and Wilson
consistently put their faith in wise men who would LEAD, as opposed to
mere representatives of the people, such as congressmen and senators and
the outmoded institutions these represented.
Whether we look at the fervid correspondence between House and
Wilson, or the equally high-minded soul-directing correspondence between
House and world financial visionary Willard Straight, or between
wealthy dilettante roving statesman Charles R. Crane and Wilson, the
same certainties and fervent enthusiasm for “the great work” emerge.
To make a long story short, the two became “intimates,” as they were
both fond of saying. After House helped get the one-term Governor
elected President in 1912, a Washington insider asked the new President
about House’s apparent authority to make political commitments about the
future. Wilson replied:”Mr. House is my second personality. He is my
independent self. His thoughts and mine are one.”
And from behind the scenes, House ramrodded the new administration’s
legislation implementing the Federal Reserve and much else. His
communications with the Governor, as he continued to address his
presidential friend, were always flattering, always indirect, always
purposeful, and full of sage advice. His role in managing William
Jennings Bryan was especially important: gaining Bryan’s endorsement the
election, persuading Wilson to appoint him Secretary of State, keeping
the unpredictable but powerful populist off balance and isolated from
the President’s inner circle.
But soon House found a still larger stage and with Wilson’s
agreement, roamed Europe with the full authority of the President’s
intimate and special emissary, meeting with kings, prime ministers,
intellectuals, and others, “planting,” as he said, “the seeds of peace.”
As Walter Millis pointed out in his 1935 analysis of House’s
“diplomatic” efforts, the Colonel was a supreme political operative in
the United States but knew European international politics a little, and
the craft of diplomacy not at all. Millis suggested that for all the
“seeds” the Colonel planted with European leaders, none of them had the
least chance of germinating.
Once the war broke out in August 1914, House concentrated on putting
Woodrow Wilson in a position to mediate the terrible war raging in
Europe, a feat that would have made Wilson in some ways the chief
benefactor of the world. Theodore Roosevelt had brokered the end to a
much less extensive war (the Russo-Japanese conflict of 1904-5) and won
the Nobel Peace Prize. Both House and Wilson considered Wilson the far
greater man.
Of course, any mediation by Wilson would come from a country that was
supplying one side of the conflict exclusively with money, arms,
ammunition, food, and other necessities of war. Even so, the Germans
seemed tempted to take up Wilson’s mediation offers at several points.
Indeed, from Wilson’s point of view, he made progress in mediation in
the coming months and after more U-Boat sinkings of armed civilian
vessels in designated zones. In the spring of 1916, he was able to
pressure the Germans to drop their unlimited submarine warfare program.
In spite of increasing talk of “preparedness” and anti-German
sentiment in the United States, Americans were on the whole far from
ready to see their country intervene directly in the war. There was in
any case, an election campaign to wage in 1916. But the stage was being
set for American intervention in “the great crusade for democracy” being
carried out by Britain, France, and the Russian “Tsar and Autocrat of
All the Russias.”
Yet long before 1916, three months before the Lusitania
sinking, House had met in London with the British Foreign Secretary,
Lord Grey, and made an amazing commitment. The Colonel had vague
instructions from Wilson to persuade the British to lift the Blockade.
Instead, as historian Justus Doenecke has commented, “Secretly defying
the President, House uncritically supported Britain’s war effort. More
significantly, he committed his nation, under certain conditions, to
enter the conflict on the Allied side.”Note: The views expressed on Mises.org are not necessarily those of the Mises Institute.